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August 31, 2006

Surreal Spam

I’ve begun receiving commercial comments that read, “This post isn’t a spam,” followed by links to pharmaceuticals, casinos, or whatever. Though the questions it raises delight me, I’m still going to delete all of them.

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Another IPO I Missed

Pippa calls my attention to this new product. She expresses skepticism about it, which I share. (I am little worried about that title bar. . . .)

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August 29, 2006

Two Davids

I’d rather listen to a record by David Byrne, but I’ll turn to David Weinberger for analysis of ideas and knowledge. Byrne set out to “draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure,” or “draw a Venn diagram about relationships,” but Weinberger sees that when we construct tree-like maps and treat them as the true shape of knowledge, we impose an extrinsic order that conceals other sorts of connection. I’ stick with David W. on the miscellaneity of knowledge, but — to be fair — even on his best day, David couldn’t equal Byrne’s “The Great Curve” or “Born Under Punches,” or even a lesser effort such as “Don’t Worry ’Bout the Government.” And, to be fairer still, Byrne doesn’t present these as “the nature of the world,” but as thought experiments. I just think that David B. does better with music than with thought.

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August 28, 2006

Deja Vu

When I was in grade school during the Cold War, I was taught that in Communist countries, the government could spy on their citizens with impunity — citizens could never know whether their phone calls were being tapped. You weren’t allowed to take pictures of trains or public buildings. This (I was instructed) proved the superiority of our free, open society.

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August 27, 2006

Hmmm, No Clever Title

Well, the sermon came and went (transcribed in the extended section) , and people seem to have received it cordially, though I would myself level some criticisms of it (in line with yesterday’s post). In fact, Pippa herself gently prodded me to justify what she took to be a relatively tenuous link from the readings to the sermon. She had missed an explicit thematic connection, but she’s right that it should be stronger, and I’m intensely proud that she can listen critically and identify flaws.

In one of those preacher’s-nightmare scenarios, the 8 o’clock congregation read a different psalm fro the 10 o’clock

I thought of David and the congregation at St. Patrick’s; I hope that today’s service helps them make another step out of devastation into restoration.

I claim some degree of expertise in the matter of falling. When my father referred to me as “the Rudolf Nureyev of Woodwell Street,” he meant the comparison affectionately, but not in a straightforwardly flattering way. When my college friends identified “Akmitis” as a magnetic field disturbance usually observed in close proximity to Akma, characterized by objects suddenly being knocked over, breaking, or otherwise being upset, they had noticed that whenever I’m around, they ought to keep a close eye on their glassware. From years of playing street football and coming home with scrapes, bruises, lumps and contusions, to years of spilled bottles, tumbling books, cascading stacks of papers, I have to acknowledge to you this morning from this very pulpit that I have learned about gravity on an experiential basis. I am a clumsy man, and I know a good bit about falling.

I know about falling not only in the literal gravitational sense, but also in the spiritual sense. We fall from the grace for which God created us into all manner of wrongdoing: sometimes trivial, and sometimes dreadfully malignant. Falling comes easily, it’s second nature to us; it requires less energy than standing up. When someone asks me a difficult or embarrassing question, I feel the temptation to fall into a simple, convenient deception; when other drivers speed on the highway, I fall into keeping pace with them; and we won’t even talk about procrastinating and day dreaming (I may get around to those topics later). St. Paul said that all of us have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God, and in this area as well as in my physical coordination I know well what he means.

Speaking, then, as an expert on falling, I will add that I usually do not experience falling as something that I have chosen to do. One moment I’m going about my business, managing moderately well, and the next moment I’m rapidly approaching the floor with my nose — or one moment, I’m conducting myself in a manner befitting a decent, middle-aged Christian man, and the next minute I’m stumbling into some waywardness. Falling overtakes me and catches me, and the hard part is actually not the falling itself, but the sudden stop at the end. We can relax and get used to falling; the starting and stopping, though, make falling a painful, frustrating part of life.

To a people who sometimes fall, who fall more often than we really ought to, Joshua calls out the reminder that we don’t need to fall. Although it’s easy to live down to gravitationally-determined standards, we can break out of the habit of falling, of drifting ever downward, of letting forces beyond our control pull on us. Joshua gathers the congregation together and asks them to take stock of themselves: will they fall into habits and practices that “everyone does,” worshiping the gods from Beyond the River, the gods of the Egyptians and the Amorites, gods that draw them away from the God who called them together from the first? “Choose this day whom you will serve”: will you yield to the terms of a fallen life? If so, you have little to expect but more bumps and bruises, more relaxing rushes followed by more painful encounters — and the prospect of a very sudden stop at the end.

As an expert on falling, though, I have to warn you that the topic of choosing entails some precipitous dangers of its own. “Choosing” invokes a whole boatload of stumbling-blocks about power, freedom, ability, and our capacity to form sound decisions about how we should order our lives. Joshua’s challenge affords the temptation that we can simply take control of the reins of our lives and make right things happen, choose only correct paths, and thereby bring about a happy ending with no bruised bones, no shattered china, no dented haloes. But falling isn’t like that, and choosing isn't like that, and even on our best days we exercise relatively little control over what befalls us — let alone the days when cataclysmic hurricanes wipe out whole regions, or disease devastates our loved ones. Choose ye this day, and choose wisely, but before you make any choices let’s review a basic, subtle point of the physics of Christian discipleship. Let’s recall, and let’s never forget, that grace lifts us up beyond the pull of gravity.

The physics of grace defy the laws of daily routine, the confute common sense. Through grace, we extend love and patience to people who don’t deserve it — and I don’t mean just those people over there, but you and me right here. We know in our parish life that church people engage in behavior unbecoming an emissary of the Gospel because we have caught ourselves doing that. St. Luke’s rises this morning not because we’re so unimpeachably pure, but because grace will not let go of us. God gathers us as a people upon whom unfair blessings are lavished, and God reaches out ever further, ever more patiently, to bless more and more, nation upon nation and generations and generations of people who didn’t qualify on an entrance exam, didn’t pass the lie detector test, who didn’t get extra credit points for optional questions, but who were willing to let grace break their habit of falling.

Most of the time, that change comes upon us not as a choice that we make standing with Joshua, presenting ourselves before the Lord at Shechem. A strong will determined to make a choice for God can hinder our spirit and weigh us down. More often, we don’t so much make a dramatic choice; instead, we let go of our persistent inclination to fall, let go of the familiarity of falling, and permit God to buoy us to new possibilities that we hadn’t known before. We stop grousing about this religious nut with the hard teaching about “I am the bread of life,” and we taste and see that in this communion we savor a soupçon of eternity, of unity, of the truth. In fact, we do many of the same things we did before we crossed the threshold of grace — but they begin subtly to mesh, to extend themselves, to draw us away from the attraction of falling and they gently pull us heavenward. At first we’re falling, then just drifting, then floating, then without fanfare or foofaraw we notice that falling no longer has a claim on us, that our lightness has come as we release our pride, our control, the felt necessity of our being in charge. When our spirit lets go of the urgent expectation that we set God and the universe straight on our terms — if only God weren’t such a slow learner! — we allow the Holy Spirit to show us that it was our own will, our own self, holding us imprisoned all along.

If we bracket, for a minute, the specific asymmetrically-gendered language in the Epistle to the Ephesians and read the passage for its model of how disciples interact with one another, the epistle can remind us that we inherit the family occupation of demonstrating God’s ways to the world — and that we most truly represent God’s ways, God’s own habits and practices, by giving, sharing, forgiving, waiting. Jesus walked among us as a healer and feeder, a teacher and comforter, and he did not stop nourishing and tenderly caring for us even to the point of showing us what faithfulness meant, what generosity meant, yielding up his mortal life rather than relinquishing to gravity.

And what gravity could not hold onto, arose.

Speaking as an expert on falling, I can tell you with confidence that this rising business differs from falling in more ways than just an opposite direction on the vector arrow. When we free ourselves from falling, when we permit God to free us from falling, we move more fully into a life unlimited by the exigencies that overload us. When we come clean about the density of our sin, no power on earth will be able to use that weight against us. Our new life brings us joy, as grace displaces gravity with levity. Forgiving grace lifts the burden of our frailty off our shoulders and we rise, liberated from the crushing obligation to do it all on our own. We rise, stronger and lighter and freer to do what lies within our grasp and trusting that God will bring to completion what we cannot attain unaided. We rise from the shackles of the agonizing curse of having to save ourselves. We rise, because we are possessed by a grace that no force of nature can stifle. This isn’t just better than falling, it’s the truth, the way things ought to be, the way things are if we don’t devote so much misplaced energy to making them our way.

I have copious experience of falling, in the flesh and in the spirit, and I’m not done falling yet; the new life still giddies me, I totter, and in clutching for balance I knock everything out of alignment. Maybe you fall a little, too. Maybe each of us now staggers, now lurches — and yet we learn in our unsteady path, teetering toward the table around which our parish dances its halting dance, and our church jitters around us, and all the churches, and all God’s people, and creation and earth and heaven, we learn that the swoops that used to hurtle us down to the Pit, now take their place in a choreography of motion so exquisite that our mere perception of it lifts us up, laughing, weeping, gladding our heart and rejoicing our spirit, resting our bodies in hope. For the Body of Christ has not fallen: He is risen, we are risen, and we will rise and keep on rising, to new and unending life in him.

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August 26, 2006

Preaching: Content and Structure

I’m fiddling around with tomorrow’s sermon. I have a heap of points that I want to make, but “points” are cheap; anyone can meander around and hit a few points, valid points, if you allow enough time.

A standout sermon will pick up some of the same “points” that a more casual sermon touches on, and will order them in a way that strengthens the convincing power of each, and integrates them into a vision of the whole gospel. Here’s a significant weakness of much “justice” homiletics; many preachers walk through a relatively predictable series of points about inclusion, equality, poverty, and liberation, without structuring the sermon so that these carry more weight than “a bunch of things that Christians think are good [or ‘bad,’ depending].” Theologians didn’t simply discover justice and liberation in the 1960’s, and the theological significance of these themes ramifies through more stories than only the Exodus, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the anonymous woman who anointed Jesus, and so on. “Justice” absolutely constitutes a cardinal theological theme — but we only enfeeble our preaching when we don’t make strong connections with the whole of the gospel. (And it’s not only “justice” preaching — one could say the same thing about “the tradition” or any of countless other homiletical themes).

We preachers often care so much about our points that we neglect the vital importance of integrating them in a coherent, intelligible, convincing structure. That’s a more complex task, and we don’t always do it well even when we try. But (as my students will acknowledge), the gospel is more complicated than just the points, and we best serve the whole gospel when we attend not only to its fruits, but to its roots as well.

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August 25, 2006

Composing

I’m preaching Sunday, working on the texts, looking for the hook. The readings are Joshua 24:1-2a,14-25 (“Choose ye this day whom you will serve”); Psalm 16; Ephesians 5:21-33 (the dreaded “Wives, be subject to your husbands”); and John 6:60-69, the end of the Bread of Life discourse.

Right now, I suspect I’ll want to pick up and interrogate the question of “choosing” — but since I don’t have a hook, it’s hard to tell what’ll become the most important element in the whole.

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August 24, 2006

Church History At Last

This fall, for the last time, I’ll teach my Early Church History course. (Next year we switch to semesters, and this course will be wrapped into a one-semester über-survey of church histry; I may occasionally teach topics in early history, but will no longer have this intro course).

For the occasion, I’m fine-tuning the Theology Cards game. I never erally liked the designation for people who died a natural death, so I’ll go fix that on all the cards.

I’m also going to look into make a set of Chronology cards. Pippa has developed in interest in Chronology in the past year or so, and we play by a simple set of rules (simpler than the rules given with the game): each player turns over a card and has to guess/say where that card fits among the cards in the other player’s tableau. For instance, my first card may be “Abraham Lincoln assassinated,” and Si’s is “The Battle of Hastings.” I draw “The beginning of the Tang Dynasty,” and have to determine whether that was before or after Lincoln’s death in 1865 (it was, founded in the early seventh century). Si draws “U.S. Bicentennial Celebration” and has to guess whether that came before or after 1066. Then I draw “Morocco conquers the Songhai Empire,” and I have to decide whether that took place before the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, or between that date and Lincoln’s assassination, or after Lincoln’s death. (It was 1581, so between the two otehr dates.) And so on.

I’ll make up a series of cards for the church history class, so that they can play this homegrown version of Chronology to learn the basic sequence of events in church history, and I’ll post it on the Disseminary site when it’s ready. And once I wangle the upgrade to our MT install, I’ll begin working on the Beautiful Theology reading group, I promise.

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August 23, 2006

Two Graphic

Weekend before last, giddy with thinking, I stopped in at Comix Revolution (looking for Scott McCloud’s forthcoming book) and wandered home with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Steve Ross’s Marked. I was at one point thinking about writing on both of them in one entry, but I fear that would take up too much room, and would short-change each, so instead I’ll accord each one a separate entry. (I’m impressed that Alison B. keeps her website with blog software — cheers to her for that very insightful, practical decision!)

Fun Home rehearses Bechdel’s growing-up and coming-out, with particular reference to her father, and to their relationship. The story is grim — her childhood was not cheery, and her father dies while she’s in college — but Bechdel will not permit the story to descend into [self-]pity or facile denunciation of her father’s remoteness. When the story’s tensions and tragedy lurch toward despair, she foregrounds moments of relief, of delight. She studies her family’s fissures with the candor of detachment and the intimacy of involvement, and invites her readers to see past the deceptions on which her family’s identities were grounded. But she goes further, to teach her reader to reckon with the possibility that every conclusion is premature, that neither she nor we can escape building identities from fictive elements that we may at any moment betray, that may at any moment betray us.

Bechdel’s insight and patience mark the book as an impressive memoir; even more remarkable, though, are her gift for communicating the memoir in comic panels that constitute a complex mosaic of motifs, echoes, recapitulations, and cadences. She reproduces pages from her childhood diaries, from the books that illuminate her father’s life, from postcards and letters — her depictions representing both the original source and the extent to which she has appropriated the material for her story’s purpose. She illustrates several scenes multiple times, using different emphases as she urges her readers to see the scene differently, this time. She bares to her readers a soul clothed in dire beauty.

I would not recommend this book to everyone; it is too harrowing for many, and may stir painful memories to the surface for some. The sexual dimensions of her narrative will offend some with their explicitness, some with their affirmative homosexuality. Many, many readers, though will find here a remembrance that touches their memories and imagination with images, insights, and rhythms from a hauntingly subtle narrative artist.

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August 22, 2006

History Lesson in Current Events

Some poisons just never get purged from the system; the word “recrudescence” was made for this, with the accent on “crude.” People who want to make claims about “honor” and “nobility” and “heritage” owe the rest of us an explanation of the way that noble, honorable tradition has never separated itself from loathsome racism.

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Different Approach

If United Airlines stopped junk-mailing every member of our family “Limited Time Offers” for Mileage Plus credit cards two or three times a week, they could lower fares on all their flights. If fares were lower, we might fly more often.

I’m just saying. . . .

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August 21, 2006

Five Things

A belated Happy Birthday to Librivox! Listen to their anniversary special here.

NPR interviews Edward Tufte (yes, I’m still thinking through a Beautiful Theology online discussion group) — Weekend Edition Sunday offers audion and video here.

“Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Never Fail,” courtesy of Joel Johnson (link from Boing Boing). There’s a connection there to Beautiful Theology, but we’ll have to wait for the discussion to figure out what it is. Does anyone know what “Ben” stands for in these frames?

Tim made me go look at a clip from the Colbert Report. I’ll bet Tony Campolo could’ve named the Ten Commandments, unlike pro-Commandment crusader Lynn Westmoreland.

Micah wanted me to check out this and this. They’re both from Canadian sources, which makes me wonder whether I’m living on the correct side of the border. No, I don’t really wonder.

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August 20, 2006

Word

Multiplexities.

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Plus Ça Change

The other day I felt a rush of retrospective excitement as I read through David’s post on “why anonymity should be the default” on the internet, and then clicked over to Eric’s response. We’ve been having arguments like this for years, but it’s been a long time since it has come to the future (its reappearance is probably related to the near proximity of the next Digital Identity World Conference. Send my regards — the day when philosophical-theological participant observers fit into the schedule are over). Their insightful, well-informed, respectful disagreement rewards reading and reflection.

Since “several years” is a long time even apart from the internet, and even longer online, I’ll take the risk of repeating a response that I’ve been making to their positions since we first broached this topic. Although on the whole, I take David’s part in this specific disagreement, both Eric and David (and Doc, to drag another old DIDW friend) complicate matters by taking the metaphorical sense in which we can fittingly characterize the internet in spatial terms, and inappropriately argue conclusions about the Net that disregard the pivotal differences between the (non-spatial) internet and (spatial) physical interaction. To aggravate my current Wittgensteinian theme, a spatial picture about the internet holds their discourse captive, when the problem that David and Eric are hashing out arises in great part because of the ways that the Net differs from physical space.

I’d like to mash up their conversation with Nick Yee’s piece on “The Prison of Embodiment” at Terra Nova. Here’s the point: how do we deal with questions of disembodied identity? Most of our familiar devices for identification depend on physical characteristics (our physiognomy, external paraphernalia such as cards or papers, physical location) — but the online aspect of our lives dissolves those physical-spatial devices. If we reason about digital identity with devices or metaphors that perpetuate the legacy of spatiality, we occlude some of the decisive characteristics of the technological transition in which we participate.

Of course, the church has been trying to think through the importance of non-spatial identities for centuries, which helps explain my confidence that a theologian’s perspective can contribute to the discussion. All along, people’s identities have been constituted by the memories, links, knowledge, and patterns that they share (or not) with the rest of the world; in our digital environment, those aspects of identity come to the fore. Let’s not shackle them to simulated spatiality, but instead let’s seek out a way to work with identity in ways indigenous to a non-spatial identity ecology.

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August 18, 2006

Nothing New Here, Move Along

The New York Times article on the Dead Sea community takes the predictable “newsy” angle by playing up doubts about whether the Dead Sea site should be associated with Essenes; its closing line, “Despite the rising tide of revisionist thinking, other scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls continue to defend the Essene hypothesis, though with some modifications and diminishing conviction,” understates the predominance of the Essene hypothesis and overstates (as far as I can tell) the interest in alternative theories. On the whole, the vast preponderance of the Qumran scholars whom I know hold to one version or another of the Essene hypothesis, and since I’m not by any means a Qumran scholar, I regard that predominance as significant evidence.

At the same time: I hold to several minority positions in my own field of expertise, so I don’t dismiss those who question the Essene hypothesis. There have not been any links between Qumran and the Essene movement that approach “conclusive” evidence for their association. Even if there were stronger evidence for the Qumranites being Essenes, we should attend carefully to divergent positions — they keep us honest by focusing attention on the inevitable weak spots in our speculations, and they often enough do turn out to become the next generation’s scholarly consensus. And as I’ve said before, just because an “expert” said something, whether it affirms or challenges received opinion, doesn’t make it so.

At this point in the Qumran story, though, the Esssene hypothesis has persuaded the most knowledgeable scholars that it best accounts for the evidence we have and involves the fewest weaknesses, leaps, idiosyncratic interpretations, and obtrusive ideological imperatives. Yes, the argument could be a lot stronger; no, it’s not anywhere near an established fact; but no, the revisionists haven’t yet turned the tide of informed judgment, as best I can tell (and Jim Davila evidently would back me up on this).

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August 17, 2006

Theological Turbulence

The Episcopal Church — the US branch office of the Anglican Communion (for the time being) — stands at an increasingly awkward point, as the cartoon figure with one foot on either side of a widening chasm. Many will point out that its actually rests on just one foot, and the Episcopal Church is managing to brush the dust of the far side with its other toe, claiming that it’s straddling the gap, but at least for formal reasons, its center of gravity remains finally to be determined. In matters that involve God and the action of the Holy Spirit, we should exercise all our restraint to avoid foreclosing what may be possible.

I’ve observed here before that something desperately important about the Episcopal Church’s “Anglicanism” is in jeopardy, perhaps quite lost by most people who have a dog in the particular fights that have catalyzed this decomposition. In the established Church of England, the Church had to operate on the premise that citizens and Anglicans constitute (generally) overlapping sets; although the culture knew of Jews, Catholics, Dissenters, Muslims, and Freethinkers, the extent to which church and state were integrated entailed a complicated tension of expansiveness in self-definition. If you factor out the obligation to make room for all but the most determined non-Anglicans, you collapse one element that sustains the definition of “Anglican” or “Episcopalian”; while the church could always (and did always) develop deliberate claims about doctrine and practice, those claims had to be applied in a way that recognized the citizen-congregant status of almost all English/Welsh/Scots-Episcopal/Northern-Irish adults. (Establishment brings with it a variety of pernicious effects, absolutely; here I’m citing one background effect of establishment that I appreciate, without arguing that the legal ground for that effect should be preserved.)

Another bulwark against convulsive exclusion in Anglican identity was the Book of Common Prayer. Its careful compromises between the firm Calvinism of many Anglicans and the Catholic resistance to Reformed theology (a legacy of Henry’s theology, the determined position of some theologians, and a strong substrate in much popular theological sentiment) in a single point of theological reference obliged all Anglicans to frame their positions with regard to a particular regimen of affirmations and claims. That the BCP served admirably in that regard for so long provides preliminary evidence that something like “the historic Book of Common Prayer,” a generally harmonious series of BCPs from 1662 onward (and it would be easy to overamplify the differences among the editions before 1662) articulated a flexible but durable reference point for theological orientation.

Fast forward to 2006 in the United States, where the Episcopal Church stands under no extrinsic obligation to comprehend a maximal constituency of people-who-might-be-called-Anglicans, and where the 1979 Book of Common Prayer departs from its predecessors by incorporating a wide variety of liturgical forms (leave aside, for a moment, its deliberate changes in theological perspective) — and at the moment, many congregations treat subsequent liturgical texts as functionally equivalent to the BCP, meaning that any of nine (I think) eucharistic prayers may count as the legitimate sacramental expression of the church’s faith, depending on where one worships. Absent two powerful checks on capricious theologizing, the whole matter of “Anglican-ness” has drifted toward a Humpty-Dumptyian ideological stipulation, rather than a bounded compehensiveness. That is, when one must accept, in general, the Anglicanicity of most everyone who wants to be called an Anglican, and while “wanting to be called ‘Anglican’ ” involves at least general affirmation of the authority of the Prayerbook (with a single authorized form for the Daily Office and the Eucharist), then one can afford to be patient with dotty vicars and controversy-mongering bishops; one has an identity imprecisely-bounded, but a bounded identity nonetheless.

Without the tension between needing to take a generalist view of the church’s identity (on one hand) and acknowledging the formulations of a canonical compromise among divergent visions of ecclesiastical identity (on the other), things fall apart. Particularly when we treat the Prayerbook simply as a sourcebook and inspiration for “the kind of prayers we like, here,” and when our partisan (in a non-pejorative sense, if that’s possible) alternative definitions of “Anglican” vie for the power to enforce their theology over against opposing views, something fragile stands in peril — if indeed it has not already been lost. That loss would injure all concerned, whatever their theological stripe, however confident they may be that theirs is the divinely-justified, legitimately correct response to God’s call.

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August 15, 2006

Technical Questions

OK, I got a cable to connect my Motorola V[erizon]265, and it makes an effective USB connection from my cell phone — but as far as I can tell, one of the corporate links in this chain has set up the phone so that the photo images on the phone are encrypted and inaccessible apart from the proprietary software that Verizon sells. And the proprietary software is, so far as I can tell, Windows-only.

I had another question, but it slipped my mind.

[Later:] OK, I remembered. I’m getting sick and tired of deleting comment spam, so I’m thinking about replacing the built-in comment function (that I moderate anyway, by hand, relatively laboriously) with a link that sets up an email to me, with a subject line that included a keyword such as "feedback" (for filtering purposes) and the title of the post, and then invites you to send me an email with your comments. I can filter them at this end, add them by hand to the original post, and make sure formatting works out. I won't take significantly longer than the overburdened "accept" button of my Moveable Type installation, and I wouldn't have to spend valuable time every day deleting comments (and it would significantly diminish the burden on the ISP’s s server). So, first of all, does this make sense in general? And second of all, does someone with the chops to do it right know in a flash how to code that, or shall I exercise my overaged script kid capacities to try it myself?

That was it.

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August 14, 2006

Live! From Glen Ellyn!

Well, not live exactly, but I’m pasting the text of yesterday’s sermon into the “extended” part of the post below. Everything went very well, I had the honor of serving alongside Rodney Clapp (who was a last-minute fill-in acolyte), and renewing acquaintances with some of the people who came out for the da Vinci Code extravaganza in the spring.

The whole weekend was colored with the experience of being able to think well for a while, an experience much rarer than I would wish. At the beginning of the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant describes the way his intellectual functions fluctuate, comparing his frustrating days with the feeling of having cold in the head. His thought becomes congested, as it were, and his ideas can’t breathe (I don’t have my copy at hand, and it’s not online in English). I’m in the middle of reading Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, which reports that Wittgenstein went through similar experiences. I would tend to name this experience as a species of depression (or a related phenomenon), but I bring this all up to note that it’s a relief to remember that some pretty high-powered thinkers went through phases of this cognitive-stuffy-nose feeling.

Anyway, this weekend I broke clear of a stuffy mind and was breathing freely, and it felt great, and it helped me pull the sermon together as I wanted to. I’m thinking moderately productively today too, and I’m hoping to have a nap and move on in strength. I’ll post some of the queries and notions that occurred to me, but later.

Are any thieves among us this morning? If so, please take note of the verse from this morning’s epistle: “Thieves must give up stealing.”

We might ordinarily anticipate hearing that sort of message in congregations that meet in grimmer surroundings, with jingling keys and clanging doors, with very watchful ushers who perhaps occupy themselves more with keeping the congregation in than with helping worshippers to and from their pews. Here at St. Barnabas we find no cells, no guards, no barbed-wire fencing, so we might take these clues as an indication that you don’t need a preacher to remind you that disciples of Jesus ought not steal.

Of course, in some sense everyone harbors a smidgen of the criminal deep inside; when we envy another’s good fortune, we commit what Jesus might describe as “thievery in our hearts.” The Fathers of the Church long ago indicted their wealthy congregants for having stolen their riches from the poor who urgently need the money that we spend on self-indulgence. They teach us that all wealth, all plenty, belongs to God, and God pours out abundant resources for all people to thrive — so that anyone who keeps more than is necessary for himself, has in effect taken that from someone who lacks. When the revolutionaries say that “property is theft,” they simply echo in a sloganeering way the point that our wise forebears proposed hundreds of years before them. God’s creation overflows with the resources by which all can share in comfort and health and strength, and none of us has a claim on property that takes priority over the destitution of our neighbors.

On the other hand, if we say that everyone’s a thief, then the word doesn’t accomplish any useful work for us any more. Certainly we’re all tangled up in envy, as even the saints would be quick to remind us; but that doesn’t erase the differences between those who rob you with a six-gun, and those who rob you with a fountain pen, or between Jean Valjean (who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family) and Al Capone, or for that matter between the criminal and Inspector Javert or Eliot Ness. Theft is a many-textured thing, and those of us who do not break into people’s unoccupied houses or threaten them with a knife will quickly, justifiably, tune out a preacher who refuses to see those real, important differences.

Those differences come to the fore when we read the warning to thieves from the Letter to Ephesus in the context of our liturgy this morning, in conjunction with the Old Testament lesson from Deuteronomy, the Gospel lesson from John, and the patterns by which our worship acknowledges our sins and prays for forgiveness. The liturgy doesn’t ignore the problem of our deliberate naughty behavior; we occasionally read the Ten Commandments as part of the liturgy, and the Great Litany incorporates a humbling assortment of the kinds of sin we’re likely to commit. More often, though, we bypass the question of exactly which transgressions we have recently committed. We bracket the question of exactly how bad it is to drive a low-gas-mileage car rather ride a bicycle not because we’re soft on sin, but because the more specific we make or liturgical denunciations of sins, the more we invite our imaginations to let us off the hook: “Well, I didn’t do that,” or “How dare they call that a sin?!” Such argumentative distinctions don’t befit the context of a gathered community praying that its sins, of whatever sort, be forgiven by God’s patient, generous grace. When we read Ephesians in church, we warns thieves to give up their felonious way of life not in the context of a code of licit or illicit modes of acquisition, but in the context of a bunch of sisters and brothers praying that this week, at last, they may make some faltering progress toward holiness.

So in the rest of the reading from Ephesians, the letter emphasizes qualities and behavior that enable a community of disciples to dare to reflect God’s own character, to be imitators of God. Where God is Truth, we show our fidelity to God by speaking truly, speaking in love. That rules out wrangling and slander — even if we aim to uphold true claims about God, we would render them false by presenting them in manipulative, injurious ways. “Let no evil talk come out of our mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that our words may give grace to those who hear.” We would belie our claim to be proclaiming something of God’s good news if we devoted ourselves primarily to winning; winning is not one of the marks of the church, the characteristics by which we identify sound teaching and right action from unsound, wrong-headed efforts to live as the church. God comes to us not as a coercive enforcer, but as the patient, generous, overflowing fount of the sort of truth that cannot in the end be denied — and God is willing to wait till the end.

Were we to fixate on winning, we would align ourselves with the powers of this age that failed to recognize God’s glory at work among them. When Jesus came preaching peace and forgiveness, when people rejected him and his message, he specifically refused the apostles’ suggestion that they command fire to come down from heaven and consume the hostile villagers. When men couldn’t take the chance that Jesus was right tried to suppress his teaching, and had him tortured to death, Jesus responded by urging God to forgive them. When God reversed the judgment of death on Jesus by raising him to new life, God did not purge the earth by fire or flood it with water, but God turned poured out the Holy Spirit to deepen our faith, to bring us to recognize our frailty and sin, and to learn in the Spirit to live by grace, by confident trust in God’s power, by joyous affirmation of holiness and righteousness. Our triumphs and setbacks matter here only to the extent that we refuse ever to allow the course of this world’s events to blind us to the promised eternal triumph that belongs to God alone, a triumph wrought in endurance, in constancy, in trust and in charity.

The lesson from Ephesians condemns thievery not solely as a transgression of a rule, but as a kind of behavior emblematic of the hunger for one’s own-ness that corrodes community. The same principle applies to politicking, to relationships, to general ethics: if it serves my purposes and injures you, I have not yet attained the quality of truth that God offers as nourishing bread (even when my purposes are utterly high-minded). If I place my own comfort and satisfaction before yours, any insight, any deserts I might claim have been nullified by my hard-heartedness toward you. If I determine that God stands on my side so as to justify coercive violence against you, I align myself with Caiaphas and Pilate, with the persecuting emperors Decian and Diocletian, and in my very effort to stamp out error I cast my opponents in the role of the suffering martyrs whose blood cries out from the earth against their tormentors. Instead of winning, the epistle lesson reminds us, God teaches that our well-being consists in giving, and God does not simply send those words graven in tablets of stone, but goes further to embody those words, to live them out and to die for them, in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Bread of Life fills us with a Spirit of gratitude that overflows to the benefit of all around us, a Spirit of joy in sharing that foretells the ultimate sharing of all bounty, all joy in God’s Kingdom. The Bread of Life isn’t like anything we’ve tasted before; it inhabits us, a power for transformation and renewal, a power for endurance and hope, a power for peace and truth in response to violence in action and in words. The Bread of Life, broken for us, effects in us a victory more important than any battle on earth, and if we will let it, the Bread of Life will raise us up to wake from our dreams about power and satisfaction, and unveil before our eyes the overwhelming majesty that God will make perfection from weakness, will make a unity out of fragments and ruins, will make a harmony out of our discord.

God will bring about this grand transfiguration of all creation, and as God’s church we are called to mirror that new creation as best we can. Where God will make perfection out of weakness, we can be honestly humble about our weakness, and rely on the strength of one another. Where God will on the last day make unity from scattered separate scraps, we can exercise all our fragmentary wisdom to keep the pieces big and sound, to prepare them to be fit together anew so that of all that the Father entrusted to Jesus, nothing should be lost. Where God will make harmony from discord, we can practice singing together, sometimes restraining our voices so that others may be heard, sometimes braving stage fright to venture a solo, but always bearing in mind the beauty and integrity of the whole composition — for we are members of one another, beloved children of God.

Thus indeed, thieves, give up stealing. Stealing is wrong on the face of it, but even more wrong because stealing weakens the network of trust and collaboration that enables God’s people to demonstrate, bit by bit, gesture by gesture, slow and wavering testimony to God’s love. Stealing, scheming, sneaking, slandering, all undermine the work of generations of saints, to strengthen the whole body of Christ, joined and knit together by every ligament of loyalty as each part, working together properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love. For the Bread of Life cannot be stolen; it has always been and always will be God’s free gift to us, a living word of grace and truth. And we speak that Word with lives that honor love, that bespeak truth, that join us with one another in grace.

Posted by AKMA at 02:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 13, 2006

Omitted!

The Stylus Magazine Top Ten List of “Songs that List Women’s Names” omits the Beautiful South’s “Song for Whoever,” far more witty (lyrically and musically) than any of the titles Stylus cites, and far more self-conscious about the very notion of a “song that lists women’s names.” The fact that the song references both Jennifer and Philippa constitutes only a partisan icing on the delectable cake of this admirable confection.

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August 12, 2006

Time Passing

This morning, NPR belatedly took up the brouhaha over Núñez and Sweetser’s article (PDF, warning!) about the unusual ways that Aymara-language speakers express their orientation in time with spatial metaphors: whereas most cultures depict the future as in front of us (and the past behind), Aymara spatializes the future as behind and the past as ahead. Both NPR and the print-based media that picked this story up in June have sensationalized the alleged differences in consciousness that such a divergence presumably entails, with concomitant occasion for misapprehensions about language and consciousness compounding ignorance and confusion. (I expect there’ll be a few sermons about “Greek minds,” “Hebrew minds,” and “Andean minds,” alas!)

As I expected, Alex addressed the topic over at Savage Minds (and the good folks at Metafilter provide numerous examples of other languages with comparable metaphors for time-orientation) — but I wish he had hammered harder on the problematic pop-Whorfian correlation of language and thought. My short response simply points to the fact (as the original report notes) that young Aymara-speakers have begun to adopt future-forward metaphors for time — presumably without developing psychological disorders, or finding themselves incapable of communicating with their elders. (Or, “m ore incapable of communicating with elders than is usual for young people.”)

Posted by AKMA at 09:23 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Notice

I’ve never seen the Stephen Colbert show (I have seen some clips on the net), but I appreciate the internet wizardry that makes possible such diversions as the “You’re On Notice” board generator. For all among us who’ve got a little list, this provides a handy, clever way of putting them on notice.

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August 11, 2006

Perhaps A Sermon

I think that Sunday’s sermon will hang on the words from the epistle lesson, “Thieves must give up stealing.” Steve Fowl has a terrific essay on this premise, so I mustn’t go read it till I’m done, lest I simply reproduce what he has done better. Something charms me, though, about the letter addressing its readers with advice that seems so patently obvious, especially in the context of Ephesians’ expansive rhetoric of community. It reminds me of Laurence Sterne’s sermon “Against the Crime of Murder,” another warning that you might have thought that preachers need not belabor in most congregations.

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August 10, 2006

Dry Well

It’s been a very long time since I preached. This week’s sermon has been resisting extraction from my imagination. In fact, it’s been resisting conception.

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August 08, 2006

News From the North

I’m proud that Bowdoin College, Margaret’s and my alma mater, was planning to offer free wireless to the town of Brunswick, Maine — but disappointed that the misguided Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act prevents their offering this service.

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August 07, 2006

Looking For Sunday

I’ll be preaching this coming Sunday at St. Barnabas, Glen Ellyn, and as I sit in the seminars at CBA I am mulling over the readings for that service. The Old Testament lesson will be Deuteronomy 8:1-20, Moses reminding Israel that they must not depart from obedience to the God who gives life; Ephesians 4:25 - 5:2, adjuring the community to lives of harmonious self-giving that bespeak their allegiance to God; and John 6:35-51, the culmination of the Bread of Life discourse. So far, I don’t have a hook — but I’ll blog about it as soon as I do.

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August 06, 2006

Random Thoughts From CBA

Fleshing out one-verse characters — how does Gina do it? Social sciences, resisting the narrator (picking up clues that the narrator doesn’t want us to notice), literary-critical cues (Claudia notes that here, she isn’t resisting). If anything, it manifests a resistance to conventional readings, but doing so in the name of sound insights.

David notes that the minor character whom Gina picked is a very rich one. The servant of Naaman “brought him to the prophet” — in many respects not a minor character at all. What if she chose a really minor character? Sandra points out that anonymity plays a large role in Gina’s definition, but John’s Gospel uses anonymity deliberately to highlight people.

David P. proposes that biblical interpretations should meet the criterion of justice. Can “concern for justice” be a corrupting influence? Classical theologians would affirm the priority of “love,” which then necessarily motivates unwavering commitment to justice, but more recent generations might argue that “love” has been sentimentalized, privatized, rendered abstract, so that “love” can no longer provide a criterion of truthful interpretation. Might “justice” some day lose its critical edge? How would we know? Wouldn’t that time come when our invocations of “justice” no longer engaged us in action-for-justice (and who determines what is just?), but simply serve as wallpaper that authenticates our credentials as the right kind of people (people who value “justice,” as though people who don’t invoke “justice” with great regularity instead necessarily favor injustice)? I don’t so much disagree with David’s proposal as I take great interest in the cultural signification of David’s alteration of the criterion Augustine advances.

Mary Margaret said, “It’s in our genes as Dominicans” — which delights me since the last mens by which Dominican identity can be transmitted is genetic. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 09:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 05, 2006

Transitioning

From Anarchism and Christianity yesterday to the Catholic Biblical Association today. If I have a signal, I may blog from there.

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August 04, 2006

Went Well, Home

The talk with the anarchists went well this afternoon. I got to Champaign about when I expected — a little later due to a late start and traffic outside Chicago — but had a hard time finding the venue of the conferenec. I telephone the organizer to apologize, and when I was through leaving a message on her cell phone, I turned the car around in a parking from which was clearly visible a banner that read, “Welcome to the Fourth Annual Anarchism & Christianity Conference.” Oh.

The anarchists indulged my pitiably compromised position as a tenured full professor, and attentively listened to me give a talk based generally on the notes I posted yesterday. At the end, they had some terrific, hard questions for me. I did the best I could at answering them, but some just leave me flummoxed. For instance, even at a conference specifically designed for anarchists, some attendees have so committed themselves to state-run public education that they gave me a hard time for suggesting anything else, or for not giving more concrete suggestions about how Christian radicals could help out the work of state-run public educational institutions.

They gave me a very enthusiastic welcome, though, and thanked me generously; and I asked their prayers, and yours, for all of us who presume to teach, and all of us who commit ourselves not to stop learning.

Posted by AKMA at 08:49 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 03, 2006

Learning, Anarchism, and Faith

The blurb for my talk tomorrow runs this way:

Education: An Anarchist Approach
Cultural assumptions try to enforce understandings about education relative to age segregation, instruction vs inquiry, grading, the learning environment, seasonal attendance and separation of religion from the rest of the learning process. Radical allegiance to Jesus' way obliges us to reckon with a richer, more complicated and demanding perspective on education than simple alternatives of "public or private." A.K.M. Adam (AKMA) will discuss the education system from the perspective of his work in both church and seminary institutions, and as a home-schooling parent. He looks forward to a lively discussion on ways anarchic Christians might envision and practice education in a setting where participants can learn from one another.

What I actually plan to say involves connections among several of my familiar themes and some observations I don’t repeat quite as frequently. I’ll be wobbling between first-person singular and plural throughout, since Margaret and I share ideas and practices relative to formal and informal education (not that she’d agree with everything I say, but that the things I say aren’t neatly extricable from our collaborative teaching).

Who we are: My (our) approach to teaching derives from a wide variety of experiences, our own and our families’. My grandfather taught at a prep school and a college; my father, private school and college; my father-in-law has taught high school, and is always in demand for teaching adult learners about his areas of interest; I’ve taught in a private elementary school, college, and graduate programs. Margaret and I are public school grads, with heaps of years of study in college and graduates programs. We’ve TA’ed for others, and I’ve supervised TAs. We have pursued topics in which we were interested on our own, without institutional guidance. And we home-schooled our three children, each in a different way.

So we bring a lot of experience to the topic, but relatively little expertise (in the sense of “things we learned about teaching from academic experts”). That engenders blind spots in our approaches, but it permits some strengths as well; we try to pay respectful attention to what we can learn from the experts, while we also grant considerable authority to our first-hand observations as learners and teachers.

My own reasoning about education is powerfully colored by the situations and experiences from which I’ve learned the most. I learned a lot about comedy, for instance, from watching movies with my father and talking through the details of what makes them funny (or not), and from reading about W. C. Fields. I learned a lot about probability theory because I was intrigued by baseball statistics and, in an era that did not yet know the term “sabermetrics” I spent hours calculating, theorizing, comparing, in order to ascertain more precisely what constituted sound strategy, at the same time that I teetered on the verge of failing high-school math courses. (That familiarity with probability theory has influenced practically everything I’ve thought since those days lying behind the sofa with Earnshaw Cook’s Percentage Baseball. I’ve learned from famous and relatively-little-known professors in lectures, and I’ve had the privilege of sitting in seminars with several of the outstanding theologians of the 20th century, arguing with them as though we were equals.

Autodidact, Pupil, and Learner: Ways of learning differ in their qualities and effects, and differ in how different people take to them. An autodidact — as I was, when it comes to baseball statistics — has the freedom to follow leads and construct arguments that haven’t been pre-digested by the institutional parents who instruct us what follows from what, what counts and what’s just ridiculous. On the other hand, the autodidact risks falling prey to misapprehensions that no teacher has had the opportunity to explain and correct. The pupil — the docile consumer of an instructor’s structured knowledge — can often progress further in settings that rely on institutional knowledge, but they relatively easily succumb to the temptation to regard their institutional experience as an absolute horizon of fact and wisdom. Much as I learned about probability theory on my own, or about the Old Testament from Brevard Childs, I think I have learned best from intense deliberative argument with my friends; the communal setting, with the mutual obligations of respect and politeness but also of demanding the best of one’s colleagues, nurtures thinking (not “free” thinking exactly, but not thinking under the manipulative control of a Teacher) and seeks the greatest strengths and most dangerous weaknesses of ideas. That atmosphere provides a nearly ideal setting for learning, so far as I can tell.

L